A sine qua non of beowulf engineering is paying for it. Few
individuals buy beowulfs ``out of pocket'' (I'm one of the admittedly
rather strange exceptions to this rule) and everybody else has to find
the money for one. This money generally belongs to somebody else - the
government, the university, the company - and one has to either write a
grant proposal or a some sort of justification for the expenditure of
money already in hand.

How can one justify purchasing a beowulf to people who in many cases
haven't the foggiest of ideas about what a supercomputer is or how they
work or what one might want to accomplish with one? In a really ideal
universe, one would simply say ``because without one I cannot get my
work done and we all agree that that work is worthwhile'' and be done
with it, but alas this is often viewed as an unsatisfying answer by the
administrative individuals charged with ensuring that valuable money is
well-spent.

The key step to justifying a beowulf purchase is the gentle education of
those individuals in charge of providing the money. These individuals
are generally not stupid - they are merely ignorant, and ignorance is
easily curable. This chapter is devoted to a rational but very
simple explanation of the beowulf concept suitable for cutting and
pasting into purchase justifications or grant proposals. It therefore
departs somewhat from the wry or humorous tone of previous
chapters20.1.

Get out those figurative scissors, boys and girls. I'm writing the
following section in order to use it myself in a matter of
moments, as I too (outside of my autofunded home efforts) am a slave on
the Wheel of Life, a bottom-feeder in the Aquarium of Academe dependent
on food sprinkled by government hand, an OPM (Other People's Money)
addict - in short, one who has to not infrequently explain to a variety
of folks how and why I'm using their money wisely by following the
Beowulf Way instead of just taking the easy way out and spending ten
times as much on a Cray.